First Scientific Lecture-Course

Schmidt Number: S-3949

On-line since: 21st April, 2000

SIXTH LECTURE

Stuttgart, 29th December 1919.

My dear Friends,

In our last lecture we
were going into certain matters of principle which I will now try to
explain more fully. For if we start from the experiences we can gain
in the realm of light, it will also help us observe and understand
other natural phenomena which we shall presently be studying. I will
therefore begin today with these more theoretical reflections and put
off the experimental part until tomorrow. We must determine still
more exactly the method of our procedure. It is the task of Science
to discern and truly to set forth the facts in the phenomena of
Nature. Problems of method which this task involves can best be
illustrated in the realm of Light.

Men began studying the
phenomena of light in rather recent times, historically speaking.
Nay, the whole way of thinking about the phenomena of Physics,
presented in the schools today, reaches hardly any farther back than
the 16th century. The way men thought of such phenomena before the
16th century was radically different. Today at school we get so
saturated with the present way of thought that if you have been
through this kind of schooling it is extremely difficult for you to
find your way back to the pure facts. You must first cultivate the
habit of feeling the pure facts as such; please do not take my words
in a too trivial meaning. You have to learn to sense the facts, and
this takes time and trouble.

Figure VIa

I will now take my
start from a particular instance wherein we may compare the way of
thought prevailing in the schools today with that which can be gained
by following the facts straightforwardly. Suppose this were a plate
of glass, seen in cross-section (Figure
VIa). Through it you look at a luminous object. As I am drawing
it diagrammatically, let me represent the latter simply by a light
circle. Cast your mind back to what you learned in your school days.
What did they teach you of the phenomenon you see when you observe
the luminous object, — with your eye, say, here — looking
through the glass? You were no doubt told that rays of light proceed
from the luminous object. (We are imagining the eye to be looking in
this particular direction, — see the
Figure). Rays, you were told, proceed from the shining object. In
the direction of the “ray” I am now drawing, the light
was said to penetrate from a more tenuous into a denser medium.
Simply by looking through the glass and comparing what you see with
what you saw before the plate of glass was there, you do indeed
perceive the thing displaced. It appears at a different place than
without the glass. Now this is said to be due to the light being
“refracted”. This is how they are wont to put it: —
When the light passes from a more tenuous into a denser medium, to
find the direction in which the light will be refracted, you must
draw the so-called “normal at the point of incidence”. If
the light went on its way without being hindered by a denser medium,
it would go on in this direction. But, they now say, the light is
“refracted” — in this case, towards the normal,
i.e. towards the perpendicular to the glass surface at the point of
incidence. Now it goes out again, — out of the glass. (All this
is said, you will remember, in tracing how the “ray of
light” is seen through the denser medium.) Here then again, at
the point of exit from the glass, you will have to erect the normal.
If the light went straight on it would go thus: but at this second
surface it is again refracted — this time, away from the normal
— refracted just enough to make it go on parallel to its
original direction. And now the eye, looking as it is from here, is
said to produce the final direction of the ray of light and thus to
project the luminous object so much the higher up. This then is what
we are asked to assume, if we be looking through such a plate of
glass. Here, to begin with, the light impinges on the plate, then it
is twice refracted — once towards the normal, a second time
away from the normal. Then, inasmuch as the eye has the inner faculty
to do so (.... or is it to the soul, or to some demon that you
ascribe this faculty ....) the light is somehow projected out into
space. It is projected moreover to a position different from where it
would appear if we were not seeing it through a refracting medium;
— so they describe the process.

The following should
be observed to begin with, in this connection. Say we are looking at
anything at all through the same denser medium, and we now try to
discriminate, however delicately, between the darker and lighter
portions of what we see. Not only the lighter parts, the darker too
will appear shifted upward. The entire complex we are looking at is
found to be displaced. Please take this well into account. Here is a
darker part bordering on a lighter. The dark is shifted upward, and
since one end of it is lighter we see this shifted too. Placing
before us any such complex, consisting of a darker and a lighter
part, we must admit the lighter part is displaced simply as the upper
boundary of the darker. Instead, they speak in such a way as to
abstract the one light patch from all the rest that is there. Mostly
they speak as though the light patch alone were suffering
displacement. Surely this is wrong. For even if I fix my gaze on this
one patch of light, it is not true that it alone is shifted upward.
The part below it, which I am treating as if it were just nothing
when I describe it thus, is shifted upward too. In point of fact,
what is displaced in these optical phenomena can never be thus
abstractly confined. If therefore I repeat Newton's experiment
— I let into the room a cone of light which then gets diverted
by the prism — it simply is not true that the cone of light is
diverted all alone. Whatever the cone of light is bordering on
— above it and below — is diverted too. I really ought
never to speak of rays of light or anything of that kind, but only of
luminous pictures or spaces-of-light being diverted. In a particular
instance I may perhaps want to refer to some isolated light, but even
then I still ought not to speak of it in such a way as to build my
whole theory of the phenomenon upon it. I still ought to speak in
such a way as to refer at the same time to all that borders on the
light. Only if we think in this way can we begin to feel what is
really going on when the phenomena of colour comes into being before
our eyes. Otherwise our very habit of thought begets the impression
that in some way the colours spring from the light alone. For from
the very outset we have it settled in our mind that the one and only
reality we are dealing with is the light. Yet, what we have before us
in reality is never simply light as such; it is always something
light, bordered on one side or other by darkness. And if the lighter
part — the space it occupies — is shifted, the darker
part is shifted too. But now, what is this “dark”? You
must take the dark seriously, — take it as something real. (The
errors that have crept into modern Physics since about the 16th
century were only able to creep in because these things were not
observed spiritually at the same time. Only the semblance, as
appearing to the outer senses, was taken note of; then, to explain
this outer semblance, all kinds of theoretical inventions were added
to it). You certainly will not deny that when you look at light the
light is sometimes more and sometimes less intense. There can be
stronger light and less strong. The point is now to understand: How
is this light, which may be stronger or weaker related to darkness?
The ordinary physicist of today thinks there is stronger light and
less strong; he will admit every degree of intensity of light, but he
will only admit one darkness — darkness which is simply there
when there is no light. There is, as it were, only one way of being
black. Yet as untrue as it would be to say that there is only one
kind of lightness, just as untrue is it to say that there is only one
kind of darkness. It is as one-sided as it would be to declare:
“I know four men. One of them owns £25, another £50;
he therefore owns more than the other. The third of them is £25
in debt, the fourth is £50 in debt. Yet why should I take note
of any difference in their case? It is precisely the same; both are
in debt. I will by all means distinguish between more and less
property, but not between different degrees of debt. Debt is debt and
that is all there is to it.” You see the fallacy at once in
this example, for you know very well that the effect of being
£25 in debt is less than that of being £50 in debt. But in
the case of darkness this is how people think: Of light there are
different degrees; darkness is simply darkness. It is this failure to
progress to a qualitative way of thinking, which very largely
prevents our discovering the bridge between the soul-and-spirit on
the one hand, and the bodily realm on the other. When a space is
filled with light it is always filled with light of a certain
intensity; so likewise, when a space is filled with darkness, it is
filled with darkness of a certain intensity. We must proceed from the
notion of a merely abstract space to the kind of space that is not
abstract but is in some specific way positively filled with light or
negatively filled with darkness. Thus we may be confronting a space
that is filled with light and we shall call it “qualitatively
positive”. Or we may be confronting a space that is filled with
darkness and we shall judge it “qualitatively negative”
with respect to the realm of light. Moreover both to the one and to
the other we shall be able to ascribe a certain degree of intensity,
a certain strength. Now we may ask: How does the positive filling of
space differ for our perception from the negative? As to the
positive, we need only remember what it is like when we awaken from
sleep and are surrounded by light, — how we unite our
subjective experience with the light that floods and surges all
around us. We need only compare this sensation with what we feel when
surrounded by darkness, and we shall find — I beg you to take
note of this very precisely — we shall find that for pure
feeling and sensation there is an essential difference between being
given up to a light-filled space and to a darkness-filled space. We
must approach these things with the help of some comparison. Truly,
we may compare the feeling we have, when given up to a light-filled
space, with a kind of in-drawing of the light. It is as though our
soul, our inner being, were to be sucking the light in. We feel a
kind of enrichment when in a light-filled space. We draw the light
into ourselves. How is it then with darkness? We have precisely the
opposite feeling. We feel the darkness sucking at us. It sucks us
out, we have to give away, — we have to give something of
ourselves to the darkness. Thus we may say: the effect of light upon
us is to communicate, to give; whilst the effect of darkness is to
withdraw, to suck at us and take away. So too must we distinguish
between the lighter and the darker colours. The light ones have a
quality of coming towards us and imparting something to us; the dark
colours on the other hand have a quality of drawing on us, sucking at
us, making us give of ourselves. So at long last we are led to say:
Something in our outer world communicates itself to us when we are
under the influence of light; something is taken from us, we are
somehow sucked out, when under the influence of darkness.

There is indeed
another occasion in our life, when — as I said once before
during these lectures — we are somehow sucked-out as to our
consciousness; namely when we fall asleep. Consciousness ceases. It
is a very similar phenomenon, like a cessation of consciousness, when
from the lighter colours we draw near the darker ones, the blue and
violet. And if you will recall what I said a few days ago about the
relation of our life of soul to mass, — how we are put
to sleep by mass, how it sucks-out our consciousness, — you
will feel something very like this in the absorption of our
consciousness by darkness. So then you will discern the deep inner
kinship between the condition space is in when filled with darkness
and on the other hand the filling of space which we call matter,
which is expressed in “mass”.

Thus we shall have to
seek the transition from the phenomena of light to the phenomena of
material existence. We have indeed paved the way, in that we first
looked for the fleeting phenomena of light — phosphorescence
and fluorescence — and then the firm and fast phenomena of
light, the enduring colours. We cannot treat all these things
separately; rather let us begin by setting out the whole complex of
these facts together.

Now we shall also need
to recognize the following, When we are in a light-filled space we do
in a way unite with this light-filled space. Something in us swings
out into the light-filled space and unites with it. But we need only
reflect a little on the facts and we shall recognize an immense
difference between the way we thus unite with the light-flooded
spaces of our immediate environment and on the other hand the way we
become united with the warmth-conditions of our environment, —
for with these too, as human beings, we do somehow unite.

We do indeed share
very much in the condition of our environment as regards warmth; and
as we do so, here once again we feel a kind of polarity prevailing,
namely the polarity of warm and cold. Yet we must needs perceive an
essential difference between the way we feel ourselves within the
warmth-condition of our environment and the way we feel ourselves
within the light-condition of our environment. Physics, since the
16th century, has quite lost hold of this difference. The
open-mindedness to distinguish how we join with our environment in
the experience of light upon the one hand and warmth upon the other
has been completely lost; nay, the deliberate tendency has been,
somehow to blur and wipe away such differences as these. Suppose
however that you face the difference, quite obviously given in point
of fact, between the way we experience and share in the conditions of
our environment as regards warmth and light respectively. Then in the
last resort you will be bound to recognize that the distinction is:
we share in the warmth-conditions of our environment with our
physical body and in the light-conditions, as we said
just now, with our etheric body. This in effect — this
proneness to confuse what we become aware of through our ether-body
and what we become aware of through our physical body — has
been the bane of Physics since the 16th century. In course of time
all things have thus been blurred. Our scientists have lost the
faculty of stating facts straightforwardly and directly. This has
been so especially since Newton's influence came to be dominant, as
it still is to a great extent today. There have indeed been
individuals who have attempted from time to time to draw attention to
the straightforward facts simply as they present themselves. Goethe
of course was doing it all through, and Kirchhoff among others tried
to do it in more theoretic ways. On the whole however, scientists
have lost the faculty of focusing attention purely and simply on the
given facts. The fact for instance that material bodies in the
neighbourhood of other material bodies will under given conditions
fall towards them, has been conceived entirely in Newton's sense,
being attributed from the very outset to a force proceeding from the
one and affecting the other body — a “force of
gravity”. Yet ponder how you will, you will never be able to
include among the given facts what is understood by the term
“force of gravity”. If a stone falls to the Earth the
fact is simply that it draws nearer to the Earth. We see it now at
one place, now at another, now at a third and so on. If you then say
“The Earth attracts the stone” you in your thoughts are
adding something to the given fact; you are no longer purely and
simply stating the phenomenon.

People have grown ever
more unaccustomed to state the phenomena purely, yet upon this all
depends. For if we do not state the phenomena purely and simply, but
proceed at once to thought-out explanations, we can find manifold
explanations of one and the same phenomenon. Suppose for example you
have two heavenly bodies. You may then say: These two heavenly bodies
attract one another, — send some mysterious force out into
space and so attract each other (Figure
VIb). But you need not say this. You can also say: “Here is
the one body, here is the other, and here (Figure
VIc) are a lot of other, tiny bodies — particles of ether,
it may be — all around and in between the two heavenly bodies.
The tiny particles are bombarding the two big ones — bombarding
here, there and on all sides; — the ones between, as they fly
hither and thither, bombard them too. Now the total area of attack
will be bigger outside than in between. In the resultant therefore,
there will be less bombardment inside than outside; hence the two
bodies will approach each other. They are, in fact, driven towards
each other by the difference between the number of impacts they
receive in the space between them and outside them.”

Figure VIb

Figure VIc

There have in fact
been people who have explained the force of gravity simply by saying:
It is a force acting at a distance and attracts the bodies towards
each other. Others have said that that is nonsense; according to them
it is unthinkable for any force to act at a distance. They then
invite us to assume that space is filled with “ether”,
and to assume this bombardment too. The masses then are, so to speak,
for ever being sprayed towards each other. To add to these
explanations there are no doubt many others. It is a classical
example of how they fail to look at the real phenomenon but at once
add their thought-out explanations.

Now what is at the
bottom of it all? This tendency to add to the phenomena in thought
— to add all manner of unknown agencies and fancied energies,
presumed to be doing this or that — saves one the need of doing
something else. Needless to say, the impacts in the theory of
Figure VIc have been gratuitously added, just as the forces
acting at a distance have been in the other theory. These
adventitious theories, however, relieve one of the need of making one
fundamental assumption, from which the people of today seem to be
very much averse. For in effect, if these are two independent
heavenly bodies and they approach each other, or show that it is in
their nature to approach each other, we cannot but look for some
underlying reason why they do so; there must be some inner reason.
Now it is simpler to add in thought some unknown forces than to admit
that there is also another way, namely no longer to think of the
heavenly bodies as independent of each other. If for example I put my
hand to my forehead, I shall not dream of saying that my forehead
“attracts” my hand, but I shall say: It is an inner deed
done by the underlying soul-and-spirit. My hand is not independent of
my forehead; they are not really separate entities. I shall regard
the phenomenon rightly only by recognising myself as a single whole.
I should have no reality in mind if I were to say: There is a head,
there are two arms and hands, there is a trunk, there are two legs.
There would be nothing complete in that; I only have something
complete in mind if I describe the whole human body as a single
entity, — if I describe the different items so that they belong
together. My task is not merely to describe what I see; I have to
ponder the reality of what I see. The mere fact that I see a thing
does not make it real.

Often I have made the
following remark, — for I have had to indicate these things in
other lectures too. Take a crystal cube of rock-salt. It is in some
respect a totality. (Everything will be so in some respect). The
crystal cube can exist by virtue of what it is within the compass of
its six faces. But if you look at a rose, cut from the shrub it grew
on, this rose is no totality. It cannot, like the cube of rock-salt,
exist by virtue of all that is contained within it. The rose can only
have existence by being of the rose-bush. The cut rose therefore,
though you can see it just as you can see the cube of rock-salt, is a
real abstraction; you may not call it a reality by itself.

The implications of
this, my dear Friends, are far-reaching. Namely, for every
phenomenon, we must examine to what extent it is a reality in itself,
or a mere section of some larger whole. If you consider Sun and Moon,
or Sun and Earth, each by itself, you may of course invent and add to
them a force of gravity, just as you might invent a force of gravity
by means of which my forehead would attract my right hand. But in
considering Sun and Earth and Moon thus separately, the things you
have in mind are not totalities; they are but parts and members of
the whole planetary system.

This then is the
essential thing; observe to what extent a thing is whole, or but a
section of a whole. How many errors arise by considering to be a
whole what is in fact only a partial phenomenon within a larger
whole! By thus considering only the partial phenomena and then
inventing energies to add to these, our scientists have saved
themselves the need of contemplating the inherent life of the
planetary system. The tendency has been, first to regard as wholes
those things in Nature which are only parts, and by mere theories
then to construe the effects which arise in fact between them. This
therefore, to sum up, is the essential point: For all that meets us
in Nature we have to ask: What is the whole to which this thing
belongs? Or is it in itself a whole? Even then, in the last resort,
we shall find that things are wholes only in certain respects. Even
the crystal cube of rock-salt is a totality only in some respect; it
too cannot exist save at certain temperatures and under other
requisite conditions. Given some other temperature, it could no
longer be. Our need is therefore to give up looking at Nature in the
fragmentary way which is so prevalent in our time.

Indeed it was only by
looking at Nature in this fragmentary way that Science since the 16th
century conceived this strange idea of universal, inorganic, lifeless
Nature. There is indeed no such thing, just as in this sense there is
no such thing as your bony system without your blood. Just as your
bony system could only come into being by, as it were, crystallizing
out of your living organism as a whole, so too this so-called
inorganic Nature cannot exist without the whole of Nature —
soul and Spirit-Nature — that underlies it. Lifeless Nature is
the bony system, abstracted from Nature as a whole. It is impossible
to study it alone, as they began doing ever since the 16th century
and as is done in Newtonian Physics to this day.

It was the trend of
Newtonian Physics to make as neat as possible an extract of this
so-called inorganic Nature, treating it then as something
self-contained. This “inorganic Nature” only exists
however in the machines which we ourselves piece together from the
parts of Nature. And here we come to something radically different.
What we are wont to call “inorganic” in Nature herself,
is placed in the totality of Nature in quite another way. The only
really inorganic things are our machines, and even these are only so
insofar as they are pieced together from sundry forces of Nature by
ourselves. Only the “put-togetherness” of them is
inorganic. Whatever else we may call inorganic only exists by
abstraction. From this abstraction however present-day Physics has
arisen. This Physics is an outcome of abstraction; it thinks that
what it has abstracted is the real thing, and on this assumption sets
out to explain whatever comes within its purview

As against this, the
only thing we can legitimately do is to form our ideas and concepts
in direct connection with what is given to us from the outer world
— the details of the sense-world. Now there is one realm of
phenomena for which a very convenient fact is indeed given. If you
strike a bell and have some light and very mobile device in the
immediate neighbourhood, you will be able to demonstrate that the
particles of the sounding bell are vibrating. Or with a pipe playing
a note, you will be able to show that the air inside it is vibrating.
For the phenomena of sound and tone therefore, you have the
demonstrable movement of the particles of air or of the bell; so you
will ascertain that there is a connection between the vibrations
executed by a body or by the air and our perceptions of tone or
sound. For this field of phenomena it is quite patent: vibrations are
going on around us when we hear sounds. We can say to ourselves that
unless the air in our environment is vibrating we shall not hear any
sounds. There is a genuine connection — and we shall speak of
it again tomorrow — between the sounds and the vibrations of
the air.

Now if we want to
proceed very abstractly we may argue: “We perceive sound
through our organs of hearing. The vibrations of the air beat on our
organ of hearing, and when they do so we perceive the sound. Now the
eye too is a sense-organ and through it we perceive the colours; so
we may say: here something similar must be at work. Some kind of
vibration must be beating on the eye. But we soon see it cannot be
the air. So then it is the ether.” By a pure play of analogies
one is thus led to the idea: When the air beats upon our ear and we
have the sensation of a sound, there is an inner connection between
the vibrating air and our sensation; so in like manner, when the
hypothetical ether with its vibrations beats upon our eye, a
sensation of light is produced by means of this vibrating ether. And
as to how the ether should be vibrating: this they endeavour to
ascertain by means of such phenomena as we have seen in our
experiments during these lectures. Thus they think out an universal
ether and try to calculate what they suppose must be going on in this
ethereal ocean. Their calculations relate to an unknown entity which
cannot of course be perceived but can at most be assumed
theoretically.

Even the very trifling
experiments we have been able to make will have revealed the extreme
complication of what is going on in the world of light. Till the more
recent developments set in, our physicists assumed that behind
— or, should we rather say, within — all thus that lives
and finds expression in light and colour there is the vibrating
ether, a tenuous elastic substance. And since the laws of impact and
recoil of elastic bodies are not so difficult to get to know, they
could compute what these vibrating little cobolds must be up to in
the ether. They only had to regard them as little elastic bodies,
— imagining the ether as an inherently elastic substance. So
they could even devise explanations of the phenomena we have been
showing, — e.g. the forming of the spectrum. The explanation is
that the different kinds of ether-vibrations are dispersed by the
prism; these different kinds of vibrations then appear to us as
different colours. By calculation one may even explain from the
elasticity of the ether the extinction of the sodium line for
example, which we perceived in our experiment the day before
yesterday.

In more recent times
however, other phenomena have been discovered. Thus we can make a
spectrum, in which we either create or extinguish the sodium line
(i.e., in the latter case, we generate the black sodium line). If
then in addition we bring an electro-magnet to bear upon the cylinder
of light in a certain way, the electro-magnet affects the phenomenon
of light. The sodium line is extinguished in its old place and for
example two other lines arise, purely by the effect of the
electricity with which magnetic effects are always somehow
associated. Here, then, what is described as “electric
forces” proves to be not without effect upon those processes
which we behold as phenomena of light and behind which one had
supposed the mere elastic ether to be working. Such discoveries of
the effect of electricity on the phenomena of light now led to the
assumption that there must be some kinship between the phenomena of
light and those of magnetism and electricity.

Thus in more recent
times the old theories were rather shaken. Before these mutual
effects had been perceived, one could lean back and rest content. Now
one was forced to admit that the two realms must have to do with each
other. As a result, very many physicists now include what radiates in
the form of light among the electro-magnetic effects. They think it
is really electro-magnetic rays passing through space.

Now think a moment
what has happened. The scientists had been assuming that they knew
what underlies the phenomena of light and colour: namely, undulations
in the elastic ether. Now that they learned of the interaction
between light and electricity, they feel obliged to regard, what is
vibrating there, as electricity raying through space. Mark well what
has taken place. First it is light and colour which they desire to
explain, and they attribute them to the vibrating ether.
Ether-vibrations are moving through space. They think they know what
light is in reality, — it is vibrations in the elastic ether.
Then comes the moment when they have to say: What we regarded as
vibrations of the elastic ether are really vibrations of
electro-magnetic force. They know still better now, what light is,
than they did before. It is electro-magnetic streams of force. Only
they do not know what these are! Such is the pretty round they have
been. First a hypothesis is set up: something belonging to the
sense-world is explained by an unknown super-sensible, the vibrating
ether. Then by and by they are driven to refer this super-sensible
once more to something of the sense-world, yet at the same time to
confess that they do not know what the latter is. It is a highly
interesting journey that has here been made; from the hypothetical
search for an unknown to the explanation of this unknown by yet
another unknown.

The physicist
Kirchhoff was rather shattered and more or less admitted: It will be
not at all easy for Physics if these more recent phenomena really
oblige us no longer to believe in the undulating ether. And when
Helmholtz got to know of the phenomenon, he said: Very well, we shall
have to regard light as a kind of electro-magnetic radiation. It only
means that we shall now have to explain these radiations themselves
as vibrations in the elastic ether. In the last resort we shall get
back to these, he said.

The essence of the
matter is that a genuine phenomenon of undulation — namely the
vibrating of the air when we perceive sounds — was transferred
by pure analogy into a realm where in point of fact the whole
assumption is hypothetical.

I had to go into these
matters of principle today, to give the necessary background. In
quick succession we will now go through the most important aspects of
those phenomena which we still want to consider. In our remaining
hours I propose to discuss the phenomena of sound, and those of
warmth, and of electro-magnetics; also whatever explanations may
emerge from these for our main theme — the phenomena of
optics.